WATSONVILLE—The city of Watsonville is asking the City Council to deem a troubled housing development off Ohlone Parkway a public nuisance at its July 6 meeting.
Pacific Sunshine Garden at 1773 Santa Victoria Ave. has for more than three years failed to make various corrections to faulty construction, according to hundreds of pages of city documents.
As a result, city officials say that the majority of the 34 units currently under construction are “unsalvageable” and they must be demolished because they have become “offensive to the senses because it is a blight on the neighborhood and nearby homes.”
If the City Council does declare the stalled development a nuisance, it would schedule a public hearing concerning the abatement for Aug. 24—the body’s first meeting back from summer recess.
After that meeting, the City Council can empower staff to move forward with the demolition if the developer does not do so themselves. The cost to the city for that work would be charged to the property owner.
The item is on the City Council’s consent agenda, where issues that are typically uncontroversial are often placed.
The $35 million, 87-unit development broke ground in 2016, and it was supposed to be completed by 2018.
The Chinese investor-backed project was lauded by city leaders as a shining example of the EB-5 Immigrant Investor Program. That program, created by Congress in 1990, provides a path toward permanent residency for foreign nationals—and their immediate family—who invest cash to finance a business in the U.S.
But changes enacted in 2019 made it more difficult for interested foreign investors to pour money into projects in return for a ticket into the U.S.
In an interview for a story in the Pajaronian in 2019, Sunshine Garden sales manager David Wang said the project had not taken “one cent” from the EB-5 program despite multiple media reports stating otherwise.
511 Ohlone heads back to council
At the same City Council meeting, another large stalled housing development at 511 Ohlone Parkway is seeking council approval on a “major modification” in design plans.
Developers for Hillcrest Estates, approved by the City Council in 2018 as Sunshine Vista, are reducing the number of proposed units from 150 to 144—29 would be “affordable.”
The property was listed on Loopnet—an online marketplace for commercial property—in 2019 as original developer Lisa Li worked to find investors after the project significantly surpassed its original $60 million budget, she told this publication.
Since then, John Fry, of CDM Crocker Fry, joined as project manager, and it received a two-year extension last August.
Because it was previously a junkyard for roughly six decades, there are about 35,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil that need to be removed before any building can commence.
Li in the original plans said all the soil would be moved to a landfill, but the revised proposal says the team would remove only roughly 1,500 cubic yards of contaminated soil, and bury much of the rest in a pit on the edge of the property.
Watsonville Wetlands Watch in a letter to the city said the new proposed soil remediation plan is “unacceptable” and that it could “result in long-term environmental contamination to the wildlife and waters of Watsonville Slough System as well as the neighboring community.”
In a response to Watsonville Wetlands Watch and two other members of the public who shared the same concerns, Fry said the plan will deploy “state-of-the-art technology supported by ‘best practices’ incorporating the highest professional and scientific standards.”
The remediation plan, Fry added, would also need approval from the county’s Environmental Health Division, something that “should give the public confidence that all environmental matters have been carefully considered and addressed.”
To view the full City Council’s complete July 6 agenda, click here.
